Yahoo announced that it will shut down GeoCities, one of the company’s longer-running units, later in 2009. Yahoo purchased the service, which allows users to create their own Web pages, for $3.6 billion in 1999. In the intervening decade, however, the rise of sites such as Facebook and Twitter presented a more user-friendly alternative for consumers than coding a personal home page, and GeoCities found itself eclipsed.
The plowing-under of GeoCities can perhaps be attributed to the rise of both blogs and social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, which offer a user-friendly template for individuals and small businesses to express themselves online without having to resort to hours of Web coding. GeoCities accounts will continue until the service shutdown later in 2009.
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